Fostering conversations about the Church among theologians, pastors, and congregations.
Healing the lame (last week’s text from Acts 3) may lie far beyond our abilities. But is Peter and John’s courageous speech to the authorities any less miraculous for us?
The church’s speech in our pluralistic setting is increasingly muted and indistinct. Read more
Acts 3:12-19
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48
The cover story for the April 16, 2012 issue of Time Magazine was entitled “Rethinking Heaven.” In the article, the author contrasted the popular conceptions of heaven (as most recently found in the popular book “Heaven is for Real”) with more full bodied accounts of the afterlife as recently put forward by N.T. Wright and others. Most people within the average congregation think of the afterlife and heaven as a realm filled with disembodied souls all hugging and congratulating each other on their arrival. This is the place where we walk down streets of gold with our long deceased Aunt Sally and where God sits in a “reaaally big” chair (this according to Colton Burpo, the child author of “Heaven is for Real”).
This week’s lectionary text from Luke challenges our common conceptions of life after death. Read more
Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 4: 32-35
I John 1:1 – 2:2
John 20: 19-31
Wow! The texts for this second Sunday in our most important, celebratory season are powerful and their theme is easy to detect: testimony, declaration, proclaim, witness. Read more
Easter Sunday
Death is the peak of all that is contrary to God in the world, the last enemy, thus not the natural lot of man, not an unalterable divine dispensation. … Peace cannot and must not be concluded just here in such a way as to establish a spiritual-religious–moral Kingdom of God on earth, while forgetting the enemy. There is peace only in prospect of the overcoming of the enemy.
-Karl Barth
I recently accepted an invitation to write an encyclopedia article on death and dying, and I wonder if I am up to the task. In particular, I wonder if I have it in me to tell the truth about death. The fact is death intrigues me even as it scares me. I think about it all the time. I read books and essays about it. I have my students read and talk about it.
And yet, I find that I rarely tell them or myself the truth about death. That truth, if Barth is to be believed (and I think he is), is that death is an enemy, one with which we are never to make peace. More importantly, death is a defeated enemy, defeated by God’s raising Jesus from death. Read more
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove reflects on the murder of Trayvon Martin and the practice of reading Scripture–and being read by it–in Christian community.
The constant stream of news this week about Trayvon Martin has re-ignited a national conversation about race–a conversation that has been, in my estimation, neither this public nor this intense since the controversy surrounding President Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, during the 2008 presidential campaign. The deep pain at the center of this conversation reveals a wound that we often try to hide, despite the fact that it will not go away. Our history of race-based slavery colors everything in America. President Obama was both honest and revealing, I think, when he said in a press conference last week, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”
To read the rest click here.